Message Analyzer Performance

Today I would like to talk about both perceived performance and performance. In v1.1, we focused a lot on performance with Message Analyzer. In my daily use, I have found it to be much faster in the filtering and loading department in most situations. This is due to optimizations we have made to the order of the message hierarchically, which helps filtering a single message instead of many fragments.

We also focused on many of the core tasks, such as loading start up time. While this work resulted in significant performance gains, there are many scenarios we have not yet been able to validate and would appreciate your help in uncovering situations where our performance is not its best.

Here are a few of the known scenarios where Message Analyzer is often perceived to be slow:

Message Data tool window – Since it tries to display everything, you could have some big reassembled fragments showing. To solve this, I recommend you put the Field Data window in focus instead of the Message Data window

Decryption tool window – It tries to parse everything looking for TLS streams. This will eat CPU, though not cause a lot of sluggishness. I recommend that you close the window when you are not using it

High memory usage – This is not really an issue, unless you are also seeing the UI or your machine slow down. In general managed apps release memory only when it’s needed. I can happily open gigs of data, and while my memory stays around full, it’s never sluggish and other apps work fine. Also, the memory will go back down when another app needs more

The trickiest part of our job, is testing. It’s not that we can’t anticipate how you will use our tool, or what scenarios to focus on, but rather the randomness of the data that is possible as input. So if you find performance issues, please report them via our Message Analyzer forums. Please be as verbose as you can in describing what you are reporting so that we can instruct our engineering team on how to reproduce what you are experiencing.

Also, if you have feedback or an idea to help improve the product, we would love to hear from you. Please use our Feedback submission feature located in the upper right corner of v1.1 or newer.

Thank you for downloading and using Message Analyzer, we take all feedback seriously. It’s the very best way to influence what we work on and the features we create.